Archive for September, 2008

Before I get further into the egg side of things, I should explain our situation regarding the other side of the TTC coin. When L and I got together we both had very different ideas on donors. She was adament she wanted an anonymous donor through the clinic – while I had always planned to have a baby with one of my gay male friends. I’ve always had heaps of close gay male friends, and for me, it was more a question of whether I would have a baby with a partner rather than a best male friend.

It was a fairly tricky situation to negotiate considering we were both so adament about what we wanted. I didn’t like the idea of not knowing who the biological donor of my child was – and at the time the laws meant the was no guarantee donor conceived children could trace their donor later on down the track. L was afraid of having a known donor that would want shared custody and take over in the parenting stakes, especially after hearing about a friend’s bad experience with a known donor.

In the end we decided that it worth the risks to have a known donor. We agreed that by including and sharing parenting as much as possible, we’d hopefully negate any disputes and power struggles. The obvious candidate was my best friend from highschool J. He and Lone knew each other fairly well, they got along, he had similiar values and views on parenting. He is also one of the most gorgeous people I have ever met, inside and out. Add to that his “skinny” genes and how could we not ask him?

So we told a few people we were going to ask him – actually I told pretty much everyone except him. Then I panicked that someone would say something to him first so L and I decided while we were on holiday to ask him as soon as we got home. Less than an hour after the plane landing, he and I were in the backyard and I told him that L and I had written a list of potential donors and he was number one. Actually I told him he was the only one on the list, and we were going to give him a year to think about it. Poor love, I think he just expected a fridge magnet from our holiday!

L and I spent the next fifteen months worrying and stressing, arguing and trying to guess what he was going to say. I knew he was interested in donating to me, but apprehensive about donating to L because he didn’t feel he knew her well enough. But the deal was he had to donate to both of us – L first and then to me later on, so our children would have the same donor dad. We didn’t push him for an answer, mainly because we were convinced he’d say no, and we didn’t want to hear it. But one night he came around before L got home from work and timidly announced while I was making pasta that he would like to be OUR donor. I cried with relief, at which point L arrived and instantly thought he’d said no. But over dinner that night we started talking about how we would create our family – and L and I had found the boy we’d been searching for.

This is the second time I’ve started this blog. I originally created a blog about 6 months ago, but I struggled with finding the balance between being able to write freely, whilst still maintaining privacy. I am not sure I have found that balance yet, but I have decided to just do it anyway.

The story so far….

I have been with my partner L for six and a half years. Hard to fold that amount of time and our experiences into sentences, but lets just say we are happy. For the most part we are madly in love, we talk and hang out, finish each others sentences, we laugh and love and plan for our future together. Without sounding cliched, we were meant to be. Ok, totally cliched, but what can you do?

Then there’s the little bit that is not so happy – the bit where adding a baby to our fabulous life together has turned into several years of medical treatment, countless blood tests, thousands of dollars and one jaded lesbian. That would be me of course, L is far more of a “glass half full” kind of girl, but even she has her limits.

After a year of IUI treatments that resulted in L having 6 chemical pregnancies but no baby, we moved on to a new fertility specialist and IVF. Four cycles of that and all we ended up with was total despair and a very sick bank account. Although it was always our intention that L would be bio/birth mother to our first child, the odds of that happening seemed to be getting slimmer. Although I’d originally been pretty keen to also carry a baby, somewhere over the years of talking about/planning/ preparing and finally trying to have a baby, my enthusiasm waned. More than waned, it did a total nosedive. And although I desperately wanted us to have a baby and to be a totally hands-on mum, I didn’t really want to be pregnant.

It seemed a little unfair that L had been willing to do everything, go through so much and still wanted to do it and yet couldn’t. Our FS couldn’t find any reason why L couldn’t stay pregnant, so with our “non medically trained” theories that it must be an “egg” issue – we decided the solution to all our woes would be to use my eggs to get L pregnant. That had to be easier right?